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    Dark Matter: New Poems
    Dark Matter: New Poems
    Dark Matter: New Poems
    Ebook102 pages47 minutes

    Dark Matter: New Poems

    By Robin Morgan

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    About this ebook

    In this major new book of poems, her seventh, Robin Morgan rewards us with the award-winning mastery we've come to expect from her poetry. Her gaze is unflinching, her craft sharp, her mature voice rich with wry wit, survived pain, and her signature chord: an indomitable celebration of life. This powerful collection contains the now-famous poems Morgan reads in her TED Talk--viewed online more than a million times and translated into 24 languages. Dark Matter is an unforgettable book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781925581461
    Dark Matter: New Poems
    Author

    Robin Morgan

    Award-winning poet, novelist, journalist, and feminist leader Robin Morgan has published more than twenty books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sisterhood Is Global and the bestselling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages, among them Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Persian. A recipient of honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and former editor in chief of Ms., Morgan founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, cofounded the Women’s Media Center. She writes and hosts Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, a weekly program with a global audience on iTunes and WMCLive.com—her commentaries legendary, her guests ranging from grassroots activists to Christiane Amanpour, Anita Hill, and President Jimmy Carter.

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      Book preview

      Dark Matter - Robin Morgan

      I.

      Doing the Blood Work

      The Magician and The Magician’s Assistant

      I’ve had me up my sleeve

      I’ve pulled me from my hat

      I’ve planted myself in the audience

      as the patsy I dare to decipher my tricks—

      safe I can never see through me.

      The Magician and The Magician’s Assistant—

      I’ve been both for so long.

      Introducing myself with a smile and a flair

      and a white-gloved bow to applause. Then

      making myself disappear.

      Well, I can tell you I’m done

      dodging knives flung at my head,

      done being folded into cramped crates,

      sawed into pieces again and again. I am done,

      in short, with being The Magician’s Assistant.

      From here on in, I need no assistant,

      no props, no stage, no audience.

      From here on in, all that’s left

      is The Magician.

      Or so I thought.

      That was before I could comprehend

      that I’m also done flinging the knives,

      bowing, smiling, drowning

      in chains upside down, done

      holding my breath.

      So nothing is left to perform now.

      Sorry to disappoint.

      I have my own bare hands full

      grasping how

      from here on in, all that’s left is the magic.

      Barbarina’s Cavatina

      Such anguish over a lost pin,

      a common though useful fastener.

      Surely a petty tragedy,

      humorous even, hardly

      worthy of the minor key.

      Yet Mozart knew it as a common grief,

      the loss of something ordinary—a father’s kiss,

      an unsent letter—something small

      we search for, as if that might have held

      the fragments of a life together, after all.

      Doing the Blood Work

      1. The Inheritance

      Most family truths lie audibly unsaid

      and I, a child who probed to no avail,

      learned any who could answer me were dead.

      For years, through dimming hope lit by bright dread,

      I staggered alone along abandoned trails,

      till I ceased caring. Then of course, news came. Unsaid

      though, any testament except half-lies, spoon fed

      by two half-brothers, new-found, who wore my smile.

      I cared again. Yet they were true sons of our undead

      father, who’d rutted my mother in a ghostly bed.

      A secret child, to father and sons, required denial

      of what they dared not know. Still, truth’s unsaid

      the whole world over; everyone has bled

      their part; how else but numb can the heart prevail?

      So my twice-lost half-blood kin claimed, dead

      to untold truths from which lifelong they’d fled.

      Many die out their days this way and will

      their children’s truths in turn to lie unsaid.

      But I’m done caring who lies living, who lies dead.

      2. Not By Halves

      Do two half brothers make one whole?

      I thought they might. I thought

      this meeting, late in life, was like a minor miracle.

      I’d learn so many things! But not what I expected.

      One brother, middle child, stalks his life

      famished for the father he disappointed

      despite all he tried. So he beat ploughshares

      into swords, grew sons who are religious warriors.

      The other, the youngest, our father’s favorite,

      reenacts the tearless manhood he’d learned

      so well, emotions stored inside a citadel despite

      his music’s artistry that blurred my seeing him for tears.

      Civilized, intelligent, educated men, neither

      was prepared for the elder sister whose existence

      they’d discovered decades earlier and had

      pursued but briefly, fearful and half-hearted.

      Our father dead now, everyone spoke

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